For 24 hrs, I thought I might leave my family

God knew this summer would include some setbacks, so He made sure I was on sabbatical to provide plenty of bandwidth. I'm grateful.

One of those tough moments was 24 hours when I seriously doubted re-committing to the Nashville Family of Brothers.

Back in June during one of our recurring leaders meetings of brothers who've been around NFOB longer, the topic of ownership came up. I made what I thought was an uncontroversial statement that each of us needed to take more responsibility.

Long story short, in response I *thought* I heard each of the other guys reveal that they weren't willing to do any more to make sure our family was healthy.

I *thought* I learned that I'd be stuck carrying this family by myself (for a lifetime) if I made lifetime commitments. If that were the case, I wondered whether I even wanted NFOB.

Emphasis on the word "thought".

The next day, we discovered that we had misunderstood each other (because I had communicated poorly).

But for 24 hours, I was paralyzed with fear that no one else in our family was willing to work to keep our family going.

At this point, all of the married people reading this post are empathetically chuckling, because they've experienced this scary miscommunication about commitment dozens of times.

Apparently, misunderstanding each other, having different ways of expressing our responsibility to each other, and experiencing momentary terror is pretty normal for families of all kinds.

So if you're married, or you're trying to scrape together some kind of intentional Christian community of your own, please know that every family has scary moments like these.

Breathe. Keep talking. And hope for resolution.

It's okay that commitment is scary.